Exploring Emotions, Releasing Energy, Transforming Into Love

Emotions can be the great spiritual teacher. In the disguised form or “package” of fear, sadness, grief, disappointment, frustration, anger, guilt, shame, envy, jealousy, lust, loneliness, euphoria, excited eagerness, and so on, emotions represent this enormous Energy that wells up in us, pointing back to the Self as Source and Substance of this Energy. How we recognize, feel, flow with, live and be this Energy expressing as emotion makes a huge difference in our spiritual lives.

At the outset, we realize that we need not approach emotions with an exclusive logic of “either-or,” but can have an inclusive logic of “both-and,” for our real Identity as Spirit or Awareness is so vast that it can easily play Host to a variety of emotions at the same time.

Here’s an all-too-common example of the limiting “either-or” logic prevalent in our society: when a person’s loved one dies and soul-fully resumes life in the other realm, there tends to be an expectation that the person necessarily feel a certain grief, but then, after a period of mourning time—conventionally thought to be anywhere from about 12 to 18 months—the person should “get over it” and return to some semblance of joy and good cheer. The idea that, on the poignant personal level, one could be feeling both sadness (over the departure of the beloved from the tangible earthly realm) and joy (over the fact that the beloved no longer need endure the pain or incapacity of whatever affliction finally killed them)—this idea does not sit well with many segments of society, though with certain religious and ethnic groups this two-fold (joy and grief) emotional condition is acceptable. Similarly, after about 12-18 months, most persons are expected by society to have largely or entirely come out of their grieving period and once again manifest a basically happy demeanor. The idea that one might for several years or decades still be subject (on the level of our humanity) to strong pangs or full-blown periods of a poignant, “bittersweet” sadness over the earthly disappearance of a dear spouse, family member, friend or pet is not favorably looked upon in our society.

Again, we can affirm that What We Are as vast, pure Awareness is so free and powerful that This Awareness can easily, graciously, compassionately, lovingly and yes, simultaneously, play Host to all sorts of “Guest”-Emotions of the most exquisite, delicate flavors and textures. If a spouse loses her/his dear partner of 20, 50, or 70 years, there is simply no “time schedule” for emotions to arrive and depart or no structure that insists that emotions must arise singly, not in array of differing emotional colors.

Now, on to our main endeavor here of working-playing-adventuring with emotions for the sake of their ultimate release and transformation….

Just as with the practice of yoga, sports, and other disciplines, it’s important that we keep breathing into our emotions and also clearly witness and sensitively feel the subtle dynamics of what is happening with these emotions.

The breathing-into-emotions can be a full breathing, starting from the belly, powered by the diaphragm muscle in our gut with an outward expansion, then expanding upward into the chest (in a resonance with the heart/Heart) and then throughout the physical body and subtle body before the inhalation stops and releases into Openness-Emptiness before the exhaling of the breath.

As for the subtle dynamics of emotions, we can sensitively notice, with exquisite attention, several aspects of emotions.We might glibly declare that we are feeling “anger” or “grief” or “shame” or “fear” or whatever, but what does this really mean? What is the real nature of these emotional states?

Here’s a four-fold process to check out the subtle dynamics of how emotions “behave” in us:

1) WHERE, exactly, in our body and/or energy body do we feel the emotion—right or left side or center of the chest, abdomen, groin, back, throat, neck, head area, legs, feet, arms, hands, or as an aura somewhere or all around the body?

3) How are we internally VERBALIZING, REPORTING or TALKING to ourselves about the events causing the emotion—are we complaining? whining? screaming? Note the tone of the inner voice(s) as well as the actual content of what we're saying to ourselves in our inner verbalizing. [See Appendix 1 at the close of this essay for dealing with the content of self-talk.]

4) How are we internally IMAGING or PICTURING the events, including any dream-like fantastic imagery on a subliminal level that may be burdening or “haunting” us with an overlay of dread, disgust, despair, etc. For example, our spouse or boss might be yelling at us, and, if we pay close attention to the pre- or sub-conscious mind, we notice that there is a subliminal overlay on the present situation—a dim memory of a past encounter wherein our father or mother was raging at us with our feeling attacked, fragmented, small, imploded as a consequence. Such past conditioning can “color” present experiences for the visual aspect of our psyche. (Simply allowing a visualization of Divine Light-Energy to dissolve/destroy any haunting subliminal images from the past liberates this bound-up energy to enhance our feeling of aliveness.) [See Appendix 2 at the end of this essay on how to run this short, elegant experiential “dissolving subliminal imagery” process.]

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Paying close attention in this holistic way to the actual WHERE-WHAT feeling of the emotion and to how the verbal mind and visual mind are TALKING ABOUT and PICTURING the emotion-charged situation, we thereby bring sensitive awareness to the process. And through this aware sensitivity, emotions can be experienced and processed fully, and we stay free of becoming stuck in repetitive, obsessive feeling patterns.

Up to a point, the unforced shedding of tears or venting of rage (or spontaneous shaking, moving, vocalizing, etc.) can be useful to “free up” unfelt, unexpressed or blocked emotional energy. Again, we can give careful “holistic” attention to what happens energetically when we cry, rage, tremble, move, posture or vocalize and we usually find ourselves experiencing and releasing the emotion in an even more thorough manner that ultimately gets us through it and beyond it more easily and rapidly.

In this entire work-play-adventure of exploring emotions, we can realize that they need be neither suppressed nor indulged. We don’t need to suppress, repress, inhibit or “put a lid” on emotions, the way some cultures or families have done—producing, as a consequence, so much rigidity or deadness on the one hand and “acting out” on the other hand.

By the same token, in our heavily “psychologized” culture, we need not indulge a semi-conscious, overly-lengthy or repetitive venting/catharting of emotions just for the sake of emotional expression. Some unskilled therapists have seduced hapless clients into months, years or even decades of this chronic indulging in emotional expression—tears, tantrums, rage-filled pounding of pillows, venomous letter-writing, psychodrama role-playing, etc. As two friends of mine independently told me about their earlier years of work in “Primal Scream” therapy, “All that resulted is that I became very good at feeling angry and expressing anger toward my parents and the world.” Speaking in terms of the Hindu Vedanta-Yoga and Buddhist psychology, such chronic, mindless indulgence of certain emotions like anger and sadness only serves to groove deeper, stronger samskaras, the entrapping habit-patterns or tendencies of egoic attachment-aversion, binding likes and dislikes (raga and dvesha in Hindu psychology, lobha and dosa in Buddhism). This is not freedom but enslavement.

So our essential task or adventure with emotions is neither to suppress and stuff them into the closet nor repetitively indulge and spill them all over the place ad nauseam.

And here it is important to realize that emotions are NOT PERMANENT OR SOLID, anyway. Being meditatively mindful in the present moment, we realize that emotions actually vanish every moment, albeit usually replaced, for a shorter-or-longer period of time, by a similar emotional condition. In other words, anger, lust or shame (whatever) may arise, but notice that—like all sensations, perceptions and thoughts—such emotions are always instantly disappearing and vanishing, though quickly replaced by new forms of the same emotion or perhaps other emotions (e.g., there might be many “moments” of anger, then a few moments of sadness, then more moments of anger, then some “blank” moments, then more anger or sadness or shame, etc.).

This fleeting quality of emotions allows us to realize that we are always already free of emotions, because they are ever vanishing, moment by moment, now, now, now, now…. “Where was that emotion you just experienced so fully? Gone. A new moment of the ‘same’ emotion—hasn’t it vanished as we speak of it? Gone. All GONE. Yes, it might appear that the ‘same’ emotion of anger or whatever is arising each moment, but, as you can clearly feel the process, such ‘angry moments’ are fleeting, disappearing, vanishing. You as Awareness of anger always remain.”

Therefore we are free to have and experience emotions, not be “had” by them, driven by them. They are simply NOT permanent and hence are NOT solid. (Awareness or Spirit ItSelf is the only solid, steady, unshakeable, eternally-abiding Reality!) This realization of the fleeting, insubstantial nature of emotions brings a context of spaciousness and lightness-weightlessness (even a certain levity) to the experiencing of emotional energy.

In coaching sessions with people, I find an essential line for us to explore is how emotions are, truly, the momentary “face” of God. The Divine “Guest” in the form of an emotional condition appears to the Divine “Host” (Awareness, Self, the imperceptible Feeler of feeling), for the sake of revealing the nondual truth that there is ONLY GOD as Formless Awareness and “form-full” experiences/events.

Accordingly, an emotional situation is the perfectly, exquisitely scripted NOW moment that we are divinely-destined to experience right now so as to awaken from the entire dream of limited identity unto omnipresent Divinity. In Zen parlance, we appreciate the poignant “suchness” (tathata) or unique beauty of these arising emotional states as expressions of Buddha-Nature—just as we would appreciate and care-fully experience the perceptions of a flowering plant that we had never before seen as the unique expression of God-playing-as-Nature.

Let’s explore this analogy further. Consider how, if you were traveling to an unfamiliar region and saw such an unfamiliar flower, you would naturally be very curious to come closer, very close, and study the flower’s (and its shrub or vine’s) color, shape, texture, fragrance and other qualities, really getting to know and appreciate the uniqueness of this botanical gift! In the very same way, any arising emotion can be intimately explored with consummate curiosity as to its nature and qualities that reveal, with so much “suchness,” the Divine Presence in/as this unique emotional expression. The form of intuitive enquiry here can be: how is this particular emotion, this sorrow-anger-lust-numbness-shame-euphoria (etc.), actually the manifestation of God (Awareness, Spirit, Tao, Brahman, Buddhata)?

Along with this deep curiosity as to the “suchness” nature of each emotion that arises, we can trust or have faith that this particular emotional state is exactly what we need to be experiencing according to the One Self’s Divine Plan, otherwise some other experience would be happening according to Divine Providence and karmic destiny. The simple truth is "Whatever happens is meant to be happening otherwise (by Divine Will) something else would be happening." (And this does not preclude our situation from transforming and changing in subsequent moments, by Divine Grace.)

Thus we can be absolutely, unconditionally grateful for this emotional experience. It is the perfect expression of the Divine Dream to awaken us lucidly to being one with the Divine Dreamer, the Infinite-Eternal Consciousness that conjures this cosmos as a Divine Comedy.

Now, the intensity of certain emotions is often, well, really INTENSE! This intensity is the intensity of our human energy field, a subset of the cosmic energy field, that is to say, the Divine Energy (Shakti, Pranava / OM, Maya, Word/Logos, etc.). The perception “Oh, this emotion is so painful, it hurts so much!!” sooner-or-later thus transforms into the raw intensity of our very Divine Aliveness. Hence, rather than dis-empowering us, this intensity of energy empowers Consciousness to feel its own core Aliveness, so that we feel strong, not weak, we feel radiant, not constricted.

In this wonderfully liberating process, we realize that all emotions are but permutations of the one true emotion or radiant energy: LOVE. As we feel ever-more deeply… deeply… deeply into a particular emotion, the knot of self-contraction releases at the Heart (as the ancient Hindu Upanishads declare) and the emotion ultimately merges into and reveals this loving Aliveness Energy or Shakti that is the expression of who we really are as Spirit or Divine Presence. This is genuine emotional liberation.

It's a real sacrifice (“making sacred” of the situation) and a true surrender (of the separate, alienated, suffering ego) to experience emotions all the way through to their energy-Source. In other words, an ego-free sacramental offering unto the Divine: the energy of human emotion releasing and transforming into the energy of God/Goddess in all Truth, Beauty, Goodness and Love.

And this is why emotions are such a powerful spiritual vehicle to bring us HOME to the Divine-Self, our True Identity as pure Awareness-Aliveness-Isness-Emptiness-Fullness.

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Appendix 1—Cognitive Therapy and Self-Talk

The content of how one talks to oneself during emotionally charged moments can be examined and, if problematic, can be clarified and corrected so that one is not haunted by “bad thinking.” The field of Cognitive Psychotherapy or Cognitive Therapy (not to be confused with Cognitive Psychology which studies the nature of cognition) arose, especially in the independent work of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, and with one area of work addressed by the founders of NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming), John Grinder and Richard Bandler.

Ellis, Beck and NLP each have shown how to counter unhealthy, distorted, disempowering forms of thinking and self-talk with healthy, empowering self-talk.

Ellis came up with an easily-remembered schema, the “ABCs” of life.

“A” is the activating event, whatever happens in life. “B” is the belief or interpretation that one has about whatever is happening (“A”). And “C” is the consequent emotion that is experienced as a result of one’s belief or interpretation of “A,” the event in question. Ellis showed how “A” is the given, but “B” is the key variant, and “C” will depend on “B.” A healthy, rational belief about things will yield positive emotions; unhealthy, irrational beliefs will bring negative, unwholesome emotions.

Here’s an example to illustrate this A-B-C process. Imagine two men walk into a tiny café one late evening near Yosemite National Park in eastern California. One man is wealthy, but his fancy car has broken down while en route to the luxurious Yosemite Lodge. He was hoping to have a sumptuous dinner at the Lodge, but now he has no choice but to eat a humble supper at the café, which the owners have graciously opened up for him at this late hour. Meanwhile, another man comes into the same little road-side café. He has just emerged from the nearby forests after a lone backpacking trip, made longer and more dangerous by his enduring a bad ankle-sprain on the return trek to civilization. He is very hungry and thirsty, having run out of food and water while recuperating for additional days in the wilderness after his ankle-sprain.

Both men sit down at the café counter to the same meal of rice and beans. The wealthy man experiences the emotions of disappointment, anger and a sense of being “cheated” out of the luscious meal he was expecting to have at the Yosemite Lodge. By contrast, the backpacker is feeling glad and grateful to be able to eat and drink anything at all. “Mmm, yummy... rice and beans, how filling, nutritious and tasty!”

Both men are having the exact same sensory experience of eating rice and beans (“A,” the activating event, in Ellis’ schema). The crucial variable here is “B,” how each man interpreted the experience to himself—that is to say, his belief about the meaning and nature of the sensual-perceptual experience. For the first man, the interpretation or belief (“B”) overlaid on the experience (“A”) was a negative one yielding a consequent emotion (“C”) of annoyance, bitterness, and impoverishment. By contrast, the second man's interpretative “frame” or belief (“B”) was a positive one, yielding a sense of enrichment and contented satisfaction (“C”).

In other words, your consequent emotions depend on your belief system, that is, how you interpret or comment or report your life-experiences to yourself in your self-talk. If you have a basically negative, distorting, irrational set of beliefs about life and various circumstances, you condemn yourself to laboring under all sorts of painful emotional states.

In his writing, teaching and counseling work, Ellis (and Aaron Beck and other cognitive therapists) showed people basically how to counter irrational thinking with rational thinking. For instance, it is irrational to expect everyone to always approve of my appearance or behavior. The rational view is that some people will approve of and like me, and some other people may not. Similarly, it is irrational to expect that we will always succeed in whatever we do, without ever making any mistakes or errors, whereas it is rational to expect that once in a while or even very often, especially in difficult or unfamiliar tasks, that such mistakes will happen.

In short, Cognitive Therapy is about becoming more real, rational, sensible, balanced, and clear in one's interpretive beliefs or attitude about the situations that life presents. The result? Much greater peace, contentment, happiness and well-being.

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NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic-Programming, has some very useful language-tools for a cognitive therapy approach to working with emotions. NLP, which works with a lot of areas for exploration, was initially presented to the public in Richard Bandler and John Grinder’s fine first volume, The Structure of Magic: A Book about Language & Therapy, Vol. 1 (Palo Alto: CA: Science & Behavioral Books, 1975), a book lauded by famous psychotherapists Virginia Satir, Gregory Bateson, Milton Erickson, et al.

In this particular approach, NLP has us simply notice how our self-talk and our reporting of our experience to others can "violate proper language" and result in distorted or impoverished forms of emotional experience.

Bandler and Grinder start with how one talks to oneself and how one talks to others about oneself and one’s world. We all have a certain reference structure (life experiences) that we internally represent or model as our deep structure (linguistically as well as bodily). We then further communicate this representation/model to ourselves and to others as surface structures. In simpler words, our life experiences get represented to ourselves in verbal and bodily language, which we then communicate to ourselves and others. In so doing, we often commit 1) generalizations; 2) deletions; 3) distortions; and 4) violations of semantic well-formedness. All of these inner psycho-linguistic behaviors impoverish our inner models of ourselves and our world, and thus inhibit our options/choices for doing, feeling, thinking. A sense of inner or outer conflict can be the result of this.

2) Deletions include: a) incomplete comparatives or superlatives: “It’s better that I should do X”—But “better” than what??; b) unclear use of words like “obviously,” “surprisingly”—But obvious or surprising to whom??; c) modal operators of possibility: “I can’t ...” “It’s not possible to ...” —But what prevents you or blocks you??; d) modal operators of necessity: “I should”; “I have to”; “I must” —Or else what will happen??

3) Distortions include: a) presuppositions: “I’m afraid that this boss is turning out to be as nasty as my former boss”—But is it true that your former boss was really nasty??; b) nominalizations: turning a specific action into a rather vague noun: “Your ‘perceptions’ are so inaccurate”; “My ‘confusion’ is very upsetting to me”—Turn these nominalizations back into specific, identifiable (and improvable) actions.

In sum, by carefully noticing and simply challenging these various mis-uses of language, we will drop the impoverishing ways that we diminish and/or distort our reality and thereby experience massive enrichment of our sense of self and world.

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Appendix 2—Dissolving Subliminal Imagery

I learned this unique method for clearing any haunting, burdensome subliminal imagery from a brilliant Israeli philosopher, transpersonal psychologist and kabbalist, Moshe Kroy, who passed away in his early 40s in 1988. Moshe, along with an American rabbi-counselor and myself (the token Catholic-Hindu-Buddhist-Sufi-Taoist grad student), taught this method to hundreds of persons in the S.F. Bay Area corporate world as a “stress eradication” technique before Moshe’s early demise. I have shared it with many more hundreds of people over the years since then.

The process is predicated on the fact that the visual aspect of our psyche is working on different levels simultaneously, that is, on a conscious level as well as on subconscious or subliminal levels. That this is fact is evidenced in various studies in perceptual psychology and depth psychology and also exploited by advertisers for private industry in the well-known controversy over the projecting of subliminal images to viewers of television, films, and advertising in magazines, newspapers and billboards, a phenomenon first uncovered in 1957 by reporter Vance Packard in his book The Hidden Persuaders.

This particular process of clearing subliminal imagery presented here frees people from any and all imagery that does not serve a person’s ability to feel intrinsically happy, safe, confident and free.

So here is how the 6-step process works.

1) In a kind of psycho-physiological inventory of your energy field, get a sense of exactly where in or around your body you feel any iota of unwellness, affliction, dis-ease, discomfort, malaise, stagnant or blocked energy.

2) Discover exactly how this feels. You may not even have words for the particular feeling that you are feeling in the particular region of the body (or around the body in one’s aura). In terms of recognizable sensations, it may feel hot, warm, cool, cold, tingling, electric, churning, agitated, pressuring, heavy, numb, dead, a sharp piercing sensation, a dull aching sensation, or whatever.

3) Now, as if in a waking dream, allow yourself to see, on a level of visual image or metaphor, whatever is causing this sensation. Give yourself complete permission to see whatever appears. It might be a fantastic figure or group of figures (like a strange monster with big claws or a bunch of demonic gremlins with pitchforks), or an image of someone you know (e.g., your father or mother or uncle or teacher), or something you recognize (like an animal, machine, device, thing, place or event—from an insect to a giant steamroller to a tornado to a prickly thornbush). It would not be uncommon in this step of the process for someone to see, for instance, a more-or-less “ogre-like” version of one’s parent, with that figure perhaps afflicting one’s heart with flaming words, or else one might see a massive iron ball or steel crossbeam and feel as if it is weighing down upon one’s back. Any image among a wide range of possible images may show up at this step of the process. One need NOT censor or change any image that does, in fact, appear. Just notice it with complete clarity and honesty. It usually only takes 2-5 seconds to notice such imagery at this point.

4) In this next step of the process, we quickly allow a spirit of straightforward, vital assertiveness (neither timidly passive nor angrily aggressive) to animate our being, and in this assertiveness we let the haunting image be cleared, dissolved, or annihilated with a form of light. It can be any kind of light—a celestial beam of blue light, a purple laser light, a fiery torchlight, a sparkling wand of golden-yellow light, a shower of soft green light with pink luminous flowers, or an immense nuclear explosion of all-evaporating white light. Moreover, one can feel oneself as the Source or Wielder of the Light, or one can psychically sense an angel, spirit guide, God or Goddess utilizing the particular light(s) as wielding or enacting the light. In either case, we allow the light to quickly, even instantaneously, melt or obliterate the haunting, afflicting image of whatever was seen on the subliminal level to be causing the uncomfortable, dis-easing sensations identified in step 3.

At this step it is important to allow the form of Light to actually and completely dissolve and “disappear” any burdensome negative imagery. Some people might balk at using a form of light to destroy, say, an overbearing image of their parent. But this is only a distorted image of one’s parent. It is not one’s actual parent. We are not practicing destructive voodoo or black magic here. This process is actually an old kabbalist form of holy white magic to clear out any negative, haunting imagery in our own psyche. (Put yourself in your parent’s place: would you like your son or daughter to be carrying around toxic, haunting, distorted images of you in their psyche? Wouldn’t you want your child to assertively dissolve any such terrible imagery of oneself in their psyche?)

5) Having dissolved the inner, subliminal negative imagery back into pure light, one can breathe in the energy released from the obliterated image. This is a crucially important culmination of the process, insuring that one’s energy—which has been fragmented, with one part split off from oneself as this separate-seeming haunting image— is “re-owned” and integrated or made whole with one’s overall energy field.

6) Now, go back and again run step #1’s “inventory of one’s energy,” checking to see if you still feel any unwellness or affliction anywhere in/around your bodily energy field. And, if so, run the process again, i.e., sensing exactly where and exactly how it feels, allowing yourself to see on a subliminal level of image or visual metaphor whatever might be causing the condition, and then dissolve this image with a form of Light, finally breathing in again any energy released.

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For many people, running this process just once will do the trick. Sometimes the affliction or unwellness is utterly released just mindfully bringing awareness to the uneasy sensations in steps #1 and #2, and the visualization steps are not even needed. Most other people might need to run the entire process two or three times before they feel an authentic release from haunting imagery.

Some people may feel they need to run the process four times, five times, or more, and still aren’t sure they’re getting real release. This usually has to do with a deep-down syndrome of shame: such people feel that they “deserve to suffer” and “aren’t worthy” to live an unburdened life of well-being. Such persons usually have a difficulty feeling, in step #4, the assertiveness to allow the Light to annihilate the haunting subliminal imagery in their life.

The essential point is that we all deserve, as our very Divine birthright, to open up to our intrinsic, natural Bliss, Peace, and Freedom.